


From the Embers

by paperiuni



Series: Slow Match [2]
Category: The Borgias (2011)
Genre: Interlude, M/M, Porn With Drama, Side Story, Yuleporn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-18
Updated: 2014-10-18
Packaged: 2018-02-21 15:47:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2473709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperiuni/pseuds/paperiuni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the dead of night, Cesare and Micheletto puzzle out scars, survival and a measure of comfort.</p>
            </blockquote>





	From the Embers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gentlezombie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gentlezombie/gifts), [AntigravityDevice](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AntigravityDevice/gifts).



> Esteemed reader--
> 
> If you're just here for the smut, go ahead. However, this is a coda/interlude for my story _[Slow Match](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1095469)_. If the characterisation and motivations involved interest you (and they are sort of important), I propose you start with that one. Especially since this one will spoil you for it.
> 
> This slides into the last scene in Chapter 9 of _Slow Match_.

Cesare rises, steps across the lit square of the flickering flames in the hearth, and slides his hands into Micheletto's hair. He follows the nudging fingers to meet Cesare's mouth. His throat flexes and works against a steep, indrawn breath, bare and vulnerable, his face angled up into the kiss.

The night is passing into its darkest parts. A log collapses in the fire, coughing up a burst of sparks. There's light enough to trace the shapes of things; the hearth, the notched table and the creaking chairs; the abandoned bed with its heap of dry straw, the remains of a mattress.

Desire runs sweet and tarry between them, unlike the wild, impetuous thing that flared between them on the road under the Saracen tower. Cesare tugs at his shirt, but is content to dwell on the kiss, biting at Micheletto's lip, ducking back for a quick pull of air. Not long before, Micheletto might have wondered at his patience.

He relishes it instead while he can. It will bleed into insistence soon enough. Cesare is well schooled in the virtues of biding his time, but here, his restraint might hold only as long as the wait entertains.

Soon the laces of his shirt are loose and his mouth tender from nipping teeth. Micheletto stands and shrugs out of the shirt. He wraps his hands around Cesare's shoulders and kisses him like he is a mirage made flesh, a sun-gilded reflection in water, about to be swallowed by a rush of rain.

In this world, a man's time is brutal and bitter, shorn short by sickness, hunger or violence. Micheletto knows that as he knows the weight of his knives at hip, wrist and knee. Cesare frees the buckle of his belt and one of those weights comes off with a clatter on the earthen floor. Their breath flows together in the narrow space between their faces. With sudden care, Cesare walks his fingers over the hatchwork of old wounds across Micheletto's back.

The scars from the lash have stopped hurting years ago. He has others that go deeper down into muscle and bone. Still, the skin has healed ragged over the stripes, and his back will never be as limber as it was before. The blunt edge of a nail digs in and Micheletto gasps at the jab of pain or pleasure, the sensation skimming just between the two.

"Bed, perhaps?" Cesare offers.

For an answer, Micheletto drags him close, tucks teeth and tongue into the nook of his neck and makes him teeter until he steadies himself on Micheletto's shoulder. Cesare's fingers curl into Micheletto's hair. He teases out the lines of tendon and collarbone, thrown into relief, to hear Cesare utter a smothered curse.

" _Bed_ ", Cesare repeats. It's no longer a question.

The worn mattress and their cloaks thrown over it suffice to soften the cot. Their mouths clash together, and fingers catch on laces and clasps. With a few thumps of boots--and concealed blades--and rustles of clothing on the floor they are naked enough for skin against skin.

On the road it was hasty, rough, over soon, riding the crumbling crest of danger averted. Cesare's laughter floated into the dusty air, clear and defiant, before he shook and spent himself under Micheletto's hand. There was the smell of crushed grass and black dirt in his hair when he twisted, tumbled Micheletto into the hollow in the earth and took his turn.

Micheletto did not ask, afterwards. They gathered themselves and their horses and rode on past the decrepit watchtower.

Nor does he ask now. He takes Cesare's weight and allows it to bear him into the bed, allows Cesare his time and the studious tracks of his hands, scouring heat across his skin. Cesare has always spoken to him with word and gesture in equal measure, but this is more than the language of decree and demand, of counsel and common cause. The wine Cesare mocked as cheap and bitter lingers in his kiss. Over the years, Micheletto's scars have grown old, and Cesare has garnered new ones. The sword-slash on his brow is only the most recent of them.

As Cesare hefts himself up, putting a notch of cooler air between them, Micheletto finds the contour of knotted skin on his hip: tight and rounded, twinned with a smaller scar on his lower back.

"Arrow?" He doesn't quite know what moves him to speculate out loud. He has gone to such pains to keep the blood and breath in this body. Yet Cesare might have died a hundred times on fields of battle while Micheletto was miles and miles away.

Cesare drags his thumb over Micheletto's chin and the bristle of beard there. "Arrow," he confirms. "At Capua, I think. Someone cut through the armour strap."

He grasps Micheletto's hand, his palm to the back of it, and draws it up his side. "Knife, on the back of the ribs." That one has healed well; it's barely a raised seam. Cesare's side flares with an inhalation as Micheletto strokes a knuckle against it. He takes Micheletto's hand again, and sets it against his shoulder. "And matchlock ball. Fortune smiled on me there. Any more than a graze and I would've lost my sword arm."

Micheletto has little opportunity to study that one, save for the slight dent in the curve of bone across Cesare's shoulder: Cesare sucks his finger into his mouth with a wet rasp of tongue. He hisses against grit teeth, arching against Cesare's body. That touch seems to sing in his bones, makes him swallow and tremble before he finds his words.

"You did not," Micheletto says. Perhaps he is the one that needs to hear it.

"I did not." Cesare's voice drops. In the light of the dying fire his face is obscured, shifting with licks of illumination. He presses a kiss into Micheletto's palm, into the soft hollow between the calluses left by a lifetime of tools and weapons.

Micheletto grips Cesare hard, feels the other's leg wedge between his own raised knees. Their faces glance together, nose to cheek, and then he finds Cesare's mouth.

In this, too, Micheletto is used to shadows and secrecy. No liaison he can remember was ever free of the risk of discovery, even when more was at stake than a moment's gratification. Especially then. Now he kisses Cesare as if he has all the night for it. As if he trusts the summer dark to guard them until morning breaks. Cesare draws breath, tattered with surprise, then yields to Micheletto's tug and closes the distance that never grew wider than a gasp.

At length, desire burning in his belly and his hands tangled in Cesare's sweat-damp hair, he lets them skew apart enough to speak. "I have you now." It may be a belated pledge, or no oath at all. It is a claim he dares to make. "For as long as you will."

In each of those scars sleeps a death. This near Micheletto can hear the steady tattoo of Cesare's heart, punctuated by the shallow whispers of his breath.

"Then you must have me," Cesare says. His voice is heat and promise, the pad of his thumb sliding restless over Micheletto's jaw. "After all this time."

It takes a moment for Cesare's meaning to sink in. His hand moves with lazy curiosity as he charts the line of Micheletto's side, as if he were testing the balance of a blade--or the fit of a foothold. He masks it well, down to the choice of words, but uncertainty twines into his whim. It still is a game they play: a game of shifting scales, sidesteps and sudden turns, always around a fixed point.

Micheletto runs the back of his hand down Cesare's back. His knuckles skim the knobs of the spine as Cesare lets his head drop against his other arm. Cesare remains on the thin side of lean, worn down by imprisonment, followed by life at war camps and on the road. His fingers squeeze into Micheletto's hip with strength, though, the ferocity of his grip a hint at his faltering control. A hum of inquiry rises from his throat.

If the moment stretches, that sound will bloom into words. Cesare will salvage his own surety with some clever, cutting remark that will whisk back the sheltering darkness.

As Micheletto rises, Cesare shifts back. The fire is eating through the last of the wood, and the dregs of stubborn flames pick out an outline here and there in the room. The night is moonlit, pricked with stars, but they closed the shutters against the chill.

Micheletto takes Cesare's face between his hands, fingertips sweeping over cheek and earlobe. The scar at Cesare's temple has thinned as much as it will, tight over the skull. Cesare reaches up for his wrists, but his hands remain light, bracketing Micheletto's own.

Micheletto leans into that stillness and cants Cesare's head up, does not kiss his mouth but his throat where the two tendons meet. Cesare goes taut, in that shivering, breath-stopping way that want brings with it. 

_After all this time._ Micheletto's own words, thrown back at him in a note of caprice, as if they were a piece of wit. The careless tilt of his body forward tumbles them both. Cesare grunts as he lands on his back on the bed. The brief surprise melts away into a rough, pleased noise at Micheletto's hand slipping down his leg.

"You know this, Cesare Borgia." Micheletto rarely uses his name these days. Its edges can catch in ways he cannot always anticipate. Now he speaks it low against Cesare's ribs. It's not a reprimand so much as a reminder.

"A great number of things, yes," Cesare says, drawing short, hard breaths in between. "Would you care to specify?"

"That I am yours." Micheletto sighs, the air welling swift from his own lungs. When Cesare grasps blindly at him, strong, sure fingers fumbling for a hold, he gives up his hand without question, without ceasing.

The grip makes him clumsy beyond what he already feels himself to be. There are years of silence and solitude snarled inside him, and only the fleeting memory of rushed pleasure to guide him. But Cesare bucks under his mouth with a hoarse, half-swallowed moan, twisting at Micheletto's hand. Cesare's knees snap up as tension builds in him, then fall as he eases into the feeling. With a care that is the cornerstone of his own restraint, Micheletto learns him, inch by inch of skin: where to go gentle and where to press in testing fingers, once or twice to the point of pain. Cesare gives up a guttural noise but never tells him to stop. Never releases his hand.

Finally they are both panting and tangled together, sheened with sweat and ever shorter on patience. Cesare pushes himself upright, and, his focus staggered, Micheletto can only catch him into the brace of his arms.

"I said..." Cesare's fingers curl and uncurl, scraping Micheletto's skin.

"I heard what you said." It is only by centering himself on Cesare that he avoids being swept along by his own need and longing.

"Then, by God's wounds," Cesare mutters, "hurry it up." The last words come muffled against Micheletto's mouth. The kiss is a dare and an admission, one wound into the other as it always is with Cesare.

Micheletto takes his time. He musters patience when Cesare cannot, working him open with careful strokes and drags of his fingers. Cesare grabs a fistful of his hair and plies his mouth with a clumsy, aching kiss, then crowds in good and proper. Micheletto's groan is lost in the mesh of teeth and tongues. His back bowed, Cesare bends into him.

In short, sustained movements he sinks in hilt-deep. They both stop, tense and taut, steadying each other. Only the kiss carries on: Cesare tugs at his lower lip and then lets it slide from his teeth. Then one or the other moves, the simmering urgency overcoming the moment of quiet. Cesare grows brash, a sharp exhalation betraying the hurt laced into his need, and Micheletto draws him back down at a gentler pace. 

"If you... say a word about patience now, I'll..."

"No," Micheletto rasps in reply. "That would be the last thing on my mind."

Cesare laughs. Fucks him slow and delirious on the tumbledown bed, the guttering fire casting him half in light, half in shadow. Holds him as if he craves the closeness almost as much as the heady slide of their skin and flesh together.

And something shifts between them, something dark and merciful, something that does not absolve this sin but sanctifies it. Micheletto smothers his gasp of Cesare's name on his shoulder like a prayer. Cesare chuckles, a choked, warm sound, and follows him over.

When the fire has faded and so have their heartbeats, eased to a drowsy rhythm, Cesare makes a quilt of one of the cloaks, drapes himself over Micheletto's shoulder and closes his eyes. It is not long before he slackens into sleep, one arm splayed across Micheletto's chest.

Outside, insects chirr and the wind plucks at the vines that cover the deserted house, making the leaves sigh and stir. One of the horses paces in its tether. His knives lie scattered on the floor, but getting to his feet might well wake Cesare.

Some time towards morning, Micheletto sleeps.

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to my long-suffering duo of Borgias ladies for encouragement, enablement and peeking over my shoulder at my half-finished smut. This one is for you then.
> 
> And, as it goes, to J. for writing company and for squeeing (and criticising) in the right places.


End file.
